Letter to the Editor

Expanded Bill Burdens Consumers

The Jan. 26 editorial advocating an expanded bottle bill ["State Could Clean Up On Bottle Law"] missed the mark in terms of recognizing the burdensome new costs any expansion would place on Connecticut's grocery stores and consumers. This is the wrong time to increase people's food budgets.

Creating a costly and complicated new bill would increase the average cost of every covered beverage by at least 10 cents per container.

Expanding the bottle bill to include bottled water, sports drinks, juices and other containers would more than triple its annual cost. Water alone would increase it from $26 million to $56 million. Your neighborhood supermarket loses 2 to 4 cents on every container it redeems.

Including all of these new drinks in the bill would lead to a complicated new redemption system and would cost $7,000 per ton of recycled material, an astronomical increase from the $500 per ton the current bottle bill costs. Reliable curbside recycling, meanwhile — which would suffer at the hands of an expanded bottle bill — costs only $150 per ton.

That should be the solution — clean, efficient curbside recycling.

Stan Sorkin, President, Connecticut Food Association, Farmington

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-digbrflets0129.art3jan29,0,5655935.story